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As I occassionally blog, I managed to get tickets to enter 2 of the 7 WBCOOP events running through this week, ending with the 7th event on Sunday, the WBCOOP Main Event.

I used one of those tickets to enter last nights 1st event and will use the other to enter the Main Event on Sunday.

The starting field for last nights tournament was 1688, with the top 153 finishers getting tickets for entry to events in the Spring Championship of Online Poker (or SCOOP for short). Depending on exactly how high the finishing position was determined the value of the ticket.

After almost 5 hours of play I finished in 36th place winning a $33 SCOOP Ticket.

The penultimate hand I played crippled me, leaving me with a stack of less than 1/2 a big blind. I raised with a pair of Kings and was called by one other player. It turned out that he had a pair of Jacks and make a set on the flop. All the money went in on the turn and as no king appeared on the river, that was basically that.

I could've been very unset at a nasty suckout like that, but can't really complain as, in an earlier hand, I ran a pair of Tens into a pair of Queens but managed to hit a set on that hand.

All in all, not a bad evening.

Looking forward to Sunday and the WBCOOP Main Event. I'll let you know how it goes.

People that are interested in professional poker tournaments may have heard of the European Poker Tour, a series of poker tournaments covering Europe (and the Bahamas!) that culminates each year with the EPT Grand Final in Monte Carlo.

This poker tour was the brain child of a gentleman called John Duthie with the help of the online poker room PokerStars.

It has proved to be such a success in the 6 years that it has been running that it has now spawned a host of other poker tours spanning the world.

Listed below are the currently slate of national and international poker tours that PokerStars has created (roughly in chronological order, starting with the oldest first):

I follow some professional poker players on Twitter and currently most of them are soaking up the sunshine and heat as well as the poker at the PCA.

Given the current weather in the UK, whilst by no means as bad as some areas of the world, it is being reported on the BBC that this is the coldest winter in the UK for 30 years, meaning that I was 7 the last time we have weather this bad, the thought of reading of people playing poker in the Bahamas is a bit depressing. Oh well, maybe I'll be able to join them next year :-) Now that would be something!

"When I think of a priest, I imagine a middle-aged balding man riding a bicycle through his parish. That image may have to be altered to a paintball-gun totting, poker playing twenty-something now that I have discovered Father Andrew Trapp...."

I was listening to a podcast from the Commonwealth Club of California the other day.

The podcast was a talk from Michael Moore on his work and films upto and including his new film 'Capitalism: a love story'.

Something was said during this that made me think of the question 'Why would someone vote for a politician whose policies are going to harm you'?

At the time I was thinking of the impending disaster of having a Conservative government in this country (something that appears to be all but inevitable at the moment when the General Election comes around next year), and the fact that a large number of poorer people in this country will end up voting for them, not because their policies will make these people better off (infact it is likely to be the exact opposite) but because the Conservative party are seen as the most likely party to 'kick out' the current 'New Labour' government as they are doing such a bad job of running the country at the moment.

This thought lead me to an analogy comparing this to a person who is allergic to nuts.

For someone who is allergic to nuts, it doesn't matter how attractive the packaging the nuts come in is, it doesn't matter how tasty the nut manufacturer claims the nuts are, it doesn't matter how glitzy the TV adverts are, if they eat those nuts it could kill them, so they wouldn't eat the nuts, would they?

The same idea can be applied to politicians. If doesn't matter how smartly dressed or nice they look, it doesn't matter how convincing their PR teams or adverts and party political broadcasts are, if doesn't matter how good a speaker or narrator they are, if their party's policies are going to harm you (either financially or in terms of your quality of life or some other way) you're not going to vote for them, are you?